Joining more than 1000 experts in signing an open letter, Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI's newly launched model GPT-4, citing potential risks to society and humanity.
The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, called for a pause on advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were developed, implemented and audited by independent experts.
"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.
The experts pointed out that OpenAI itself recently acknowledged it may soon be necessary to “get an independent review before starting to train future systems”.
The letter also detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions: "Risks include the spread of “propaganda and untruth,” job losses, the development of non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us, and the risk of loss of control of our civilisation."
“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter says.
The letter comes as EU police force Europol on Monday joined a chorus of ethical and legal concerns over advanced AI like ChatGPT, warning about the potential misuse of the system in phishing attempts, disinformation and cybercrime. Musk, whose carmaker Tesla is using AI for an autopilot system, has been vocal about his concerns about AI.
Since its release last year, Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT has prompted rivals to accelerate developing similar large language models, and companies to integrate generative AI models into their products.
(Inputs from Reuters)
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